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Tuesday 05 June, 2001 By NATHAN COCHRANE
Jamie Cameron sits in his Mount Waverley home coding system administration tools, 14,000 kilometres from his boss in Utah, US. Cameron, 27, parlayed a free open source project into a lucrative career working for the No.2 Linux distribution company, Caldera. His solution, Webmin, is a Web-based tool for Linux system administrators included in distributions such as Caldera's Open Linux. It eases the headache of managing multiple network configuration and administration interfaces by bringing most of these tasks together in a browser. Cameron's work put him at No.48 out of 13,496 in Orbiten Research's audit of Linux developers, including two other Australian contributors, Andrew Tridgell (43) and Carsten "Rasterman" Haitzler (23). Linus Torvalds, often cited as Linux's primary creator, ranked 14. Tridgell led a team to build a file server called Samba and Haitzler wrote a large portion of the window manager. Cameron first had the idea for Webmin while working in Singapore, after graduating in computer science from Melbourne's Monash University. He later worked at Melbourne ISP Mira before the Americans poached him. "One of their guys just contacted me one day and they said `how would you like to work for us?' and I jumped at the chance," Cameron says. "In a previous job, people were always asking me to perform relatively simple administration tasks that were above their level of knowledge, so I created a Web-based interface that allowed them to create those things easily. "Then the idea snowballed to include more and more administration tasks." He says system administrators like the tool because they can devolve some of their functions down to less-technical staff without loss of control or compromised security. "You can grant a lesser level of access to lesser users, something you can't do very easily in Unix." Webmin has found a niche in small offices and some networked homes, relieving the load on the casual administrator. It is used by Sweden's Ikea to manage its domain name servers. Version 0.86 due to be released next week puts under the same umbrella configuration tasks such as Apache Web server manager, Samba share editing, DNS, file systems, printer modification, disk partitioning, Sendmail server and more than a dozen other tasks that usually require separate programs. It competes with other open source tools, such as the Samba Web Administration Tool (SWAT) and Linuxconf. Cameron says he wouldn't mind "world domination" of the Web-based admin tools niche, but he would stop short of user interface configuration utilities. Webmin could be embedded in the KDE interface manager, he says. When a bug was found in Webmin v0.85, Cameron was able to fix it while most of the world slept. "If you use Webmin to start another server like Apache, certain environment variables will be passed through to Apache, and if that Apache server was used by an untrusted user to run CGI programs they could get your Webmin password." Coming versions will support news servers, Appletalk and Netware file servers. Working from home has its benefits, such as no time lost commuting, but he says "there's always the temptation to sit around surfing the Web". "Fortunately, I get a lot of e-mail from users, and the Caldera guys keep me busy. "The craziest idea I get is Webmin should be ported to Windows. It could be done with a lot of work, but the way Windows works is very different. You might be able to use it to administer Apache, but the amount of effort wouldn't be worth it." Although he feels secure in his job, Cameron is concerned by the reduced commercial support for open source projects. "The thing I've noticed recently is a slowdown in companies funding open source development. You've seen it in the dot-com crash and a lot of companies who were doing Linux-related stuff are going out of business." LINKS | |
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